A performer and historian, she draws attention to the connections between musical traditions
ON A COLD Sunday night in November, Rhiannon Giddens stood barefoot on a stage in Basingstoke, England. With Francesco Turrisi, her partner, on drums and Jason Sypher on double bass, she ranged with astonishing nimbleness from Purcell to Celtic folk music to spirituals, filling the hall with her rich, resonant voice. Between songs Ms Giddens, who is mixed race, discussed the uncomfortable history of the music with the largely white audience. “I know, I’m that girl,” she said amiably, as she talked about the popularity of mistrelsy in early 20th-century Britain and the roots in slavery of some folk music.
For Ms Giddens education and entertainment are inseparable; over the course of her career she has won critical and popular acclaim for her activism as much as for her music. In 2017 she was awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant to support her research into African-American contributions to country music. In podcasts, documentaries and lectures she seeks to expose the complex relationships between genres and the reciprocity between races, places and culture high and low.
Her interest in the field began with dance. Ms Giddens grew up in North Carolina with a black mother and white father, and went away at 18 to study music at the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio. She returned home a trained opera singer, but became obsessed with folk dancing, particularly contra dance (a tradition a little like square dancing). Sometimes, she would finish her day job and travel for two hours to find a contra dance. “I was dancing to live music, live old-time bands...multiple times a week.”
Ms Giddens was charmed by the music and took up the fiddle and the banjo. The people were welcoming, yet “I felt like I was creeping into a music that wasn’t mine.” The old-time and bluegrass bands she had begun to play with were usually white; they traced the roots of their music, broadly associated with the southern Appalachian mountains, to the folk tunes of the English, Scots and Irish who had settled there. They acknowledged some African influences, but as Ms Giddens began her own research into the music and instruments, she discovered a different story.
She found that slaves played the banjo on plantations, having adapted the gourd instruments of West Africa. The music partly crossed over into white culture through minstrel music, performed by white people in blackface, which was wildly popular throughout the 1800s and into the 20th century. “It was banjo fever everywhere,” Ms Giddens said in a speech to the International Bluegrass Music Association in 2017. “And minstrelsy became the bedrock of American popular culture.”
It became clear that her outsider feeling in Appalachian culture had been misplaced. “Here I am, going, ‘Hey guys, can I come play in your sandbox?’ And I realised: I built the sandbox. My people were there the whole time in the sandbox.” She began playing with Joe Thompson, a fiddle player from a long line of black musicians, learning from him and bringing her friends to learn, too. With those friends Ms Giddens formed the Carolina Chocolate Drops, an African-American string band whose name was a pointed reference to the Tennessee Chocolate Drops, an all-black band of the 1930s. Their Grammy-winning third record, released in 2010, was called “Genuine Negro Jig”—a sardonic nod to the name of a song by Dan Emmett, a blackface musician.
A key part of the act was tracing the music’s history, including the scourge of slavery. “We learned to be brazen,” she says, as people questioned why they were playing music perceived to be beyond their tradition. “White community, black community, you name it—we got those questions.” Ms Giddens continued to answer them as her solo career took off, though carefully moderating her provocation. “I can say enough so that I feel like I’m saying something and I’m challenging people, not so much that they walk away.”
She thinks the trauma of history discourages musical nostalgia among black Americans, but hopes that might change. “I think now’s the time for us to be nostalgic,” she says. “If we look back, we also find all this beautiful strength that we’ve left behind in the attempt to run away from the pain.”
2020-02-06 15:37:00Z
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